Oakland

To Oakland today - a very pretty train ride from Sacramento (I wasn't interested in tussling with Bay Area traffic when I could be looking out of the window) - and the Oakland Museum of California, which had only a relatively small amount of nineteenth and early twentieth century art on show, but what it had was good - especially when it came to the history of mining.  This is another Charles Christian Nahl - a portrait of Eliza Jane Steen Johnson, who ran the Lace House Store in San Francisco and - the wall placard tells us - "Capitalizing on the scarcity of women in California's Gold Rush, she increased sales by modeling dresses for miners."  I don't suppose the miners were - for the most part - likely to be buying these to wear, so this is a little oddly put - but what is the whole history of this Irishwoman?  There was a daguerreotype of her on display, too - indeed a number of Daguerreotypes overall (OMOC has an excellent photo collection - lots of Dorothea Lange on show).  She doesn't look as though she'd stand much nonsense.

Then these ridiculous figures are from Antoine Claveau's 1858 Falls, Yosemite - the same year as Nahl's portrait - which is the earliest known oil painting of the Yosemite Valley - these are some of the wedding guests of banker William Ralston having fun around the Merced River.

But for the most part it was things that I hadn't gone to see that I liked the best, like Michael McMillen's Aristotle's Cage (1983) - I've chosen this shot of trailer park wreckage because you can see the mysterious skeleton man and dog flying across the sky -

and this 1959 Ruth Asawa sculpture.  Mostly, the lighting in the galleries was terrible when it came to photographing, and reflected off everything one didn't want it to - but this worked to perfection.

It's an excellent history museum for California itself - very interesting to compare with the Autry, since it tackles much of the same material, but is more focused on gold, and less on ranching and guns; and is much stronger on Black and Asian history - plenty of wonderful Black Panther stuff - and not so much so on Latino.  But very interactive, and lively...

... and then a great walk back to Oakland's Jack London Square station, through Oakland's Chinatown (some fascinating Asian cauliflowers, and roosters) with really striking street art.